The ace of trumps

Mr Methane is the world's top - and indeed only - professional flatulist. As he prepares to unleash himself on unsuspecting Edinburgh audiences, the former train driver briefs Martin Kelner on his unusual back-story

This is absurd. I am standing at the top of Calton Hill in Edinburgh in the middle of a rainstorm with a man in a green Lycra bodysuit and purple Crimplene shorts, and we are arguing about bad puns. Creative tension, I suppose you would call it. We are here to publicise the show that the two of us are doing together on the Edinburgh Fringe festival in August.

He calls himself Mr Methane, and his singular skill is to augment a series of well-known musical pieces by breaking wind in the style of the famous 19th-century French vaudevillian Le Pétomane. Mine is to write a weekly column in the sports section of the Guardian. Not what you would describe as a marriage made in heaven, but I have somehow been persuaded to be the genial host of a showcase for his unique talent.

Unique, I know, is a tiresomely overused word in the context of light entertainment (as, indeed, is talent), but in Mr Methane's case it comes close to being justified. He is the world's only full-time professional performing flatulist. His only possible rivals in this somewhat specialised field are a chap called Gaseous Gary - a milkman who had a bash at it a few years back for the entertainment of holidaymakers in various Mediterranean resorts, but appears to have disappeared now - and an American called Willy the Farter who occasionally appears on US radio shows. "Ah, but there's no depth to his act, no context," says Mr Methane, "He just pretends to be Tarzan and farts Tarzan's jungle call."

The very point I am trying to make. It is the depth and context of Mr Methane's act that I am interested in. Our show, I feel, should make important points about the nature of show business. If we play our cards right, I say, we can reclaim from the BBC Lord Reith's famous gag, and educate, entertain, and inform. But Mr Methane still insists on underlining the joke in what is essentially a one-joke act: "We could talk about all the places I have performed around the world, and do a thing about working my passage. Passage, get it?"

No, I sigh, no passages, no blow-by-blow accounts, no When the Wind Blows, or Gone With the Wind, no ringside seats, no Life at the Bottom. What I want to share with audiences, I tell him, are the fascinating technical details of how he does what he does, his experiences on TV stations - especially those that managed to book him without realising his bottom might be doing a piece to camera at some stage - but mostly the story of how Mr Methane himself, a shy train driver from Macclesfield, got pitchforked into showbiz. "We need to reveal Mr Methane's back-story," I find myself saying, prompting more fnarr-fnarring from the tall man in Lycra to my left.

Paul Oldfield is 6ft 7in tall, so would probably have stood out from the crowd even without the discovery of his esoteric skill, which came to him unbidden in his early teens, when he accompanied his sister, 17 years his senior, in some yogic floor exercises. On adopting the lotus position, the young Oldfield found he could inhale and exhale at both ends.

A hundred years or so earlier, Joseph Pujol had made a similar discovery while swimming near Marseilles, when he inhaled, and found cold water entering by the rear. Once he found he could suck in air in a similar fashion, and release it at will, Le Pétomane (literally, the fart maniac) was born, and became the toast of the Paris music hall scene in the late 19th century.

In Mr Methane's case, the light entertainment potential of his discovery remained largely untapped, although the gangly fifth-former at Ryles Park County High in Macclesfield did earn a certain amount of kudos among his peers with an impromptu performance of 20 rapid-fire raspers on the squash courts during the lunch break. But Paul remained a reluctant performer, and trained as a train driver.

"I remember being on a course learning every detail of the Brush Type 4 Locomotive, and thinking I had not had as much fun since the last time I cleaned the oven," he tells me, "so during a tea break I decided to inject a little humour into the proceedings with my long forgotten trouser trumpet."

It was a runaway hit, and Paul soon found himself in demand for repeat performances, until eventually he left the railway business - although not before becoming a fully fledged train driver - and got himself an agent.

He has never had difficulty getting bookings. I first met him six years ago when I was writing a book about "turns", small-time acts paddling around in the shallows of showbiz. He was doing a lucrative corporate gig for oil industry executives, and had recently performed at Althorp for some of the minor royals (he signed a confidentiality agreement so cannot say which ones, but I like to think it was the late Queen Mother). There have been tours of America and Australia, they love him on Japanese TV where he smoked a cigarette in a manner never contemplated by Humphrey Bogart, and he has regularly broken wind on Howard Stern's radio show in the US. "Flatulence is very much the international language," he says.

When we meet in Edinburgh, Mr Methane has just returned from Istanbul, where he has been on TV. He is grumbling about the woman detailed to hold the candles that he blows out. "She clearly found it all distasteful, so there was I busting a gut to blow these things out, and she was only holding them halfway up, making it really hard for me."

You can see her point. Farting is not a good look on a man, but it is, as the TV show acknowledges, a kind of miracle. Some years ago, Channel Five commissioned an investigation into Mr M's act, in which Dr Peter Whorwell, a renowned bowel specialist from Withington hospital in Manchester, explained how, by raising the diaphragm, Mr M would suck air into the colon through an open sphincter, then close the sphincter before discharging the air. By moving the buttock cheeks, explained the doctor, the pitch and tone of the fart is altered, enabling our hero to build up a repertoire - a back catalogue, if you like - including the Spice Girls' Wannabe, Driving in My Car, the Crystals' Da Doo Ron Ron, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee.

For Paul, though, his sphincter has been a curse as well as a blessing. He has had to move from Macclesfield, where he was well known, and suffered some low-level stalking, to an undisclosed address in the Lake District, where the locals remain ignorant of his talents.

For a while he even took up taxi-driving, ferrying Japanese tourists to Dove Cottage, once the home to William Wordsworth. These days he cannot resist the odd well-paid gig, such as the Turkish TV show, but does not want to haul his ass around the country. "It is very demanding, and I am 42 now." This, he says, is the motivation for the Edinburgh show.

When I was interviewing Paul for the book, I mentioned that I thought some of his stories - his battle with Phil Collins, for instance, to get permission to fart In the Air Tonight, the drummer's song about his marriage breakup - were as funny as the farting. We exchanged the odd email over the years, culminating in my appointment as his reluctant interlocutor.

What sweetened the pill for me is that we will be part of Peter Buckley Hill's free Fringe, the cabaret performer's laudable attempt to return the Fringe to what it was before ticket prices spiralled out of control. We will be performing for free in the family room of a Wetherspoon pub in George Street, where we will duet on Da Doo Ron Ron (one fore and one aft, as he puts it), and Mr M will fire a dart into a balloon in a method not sanctioned by the Professional Darts Corporation, but the rest will be stories, some hilarious, some rather touching. For the moment, I am fighting a rearguard action (here we go again) against botty bugles and trouser trumpets, but I feel I am winning. The show will be called An Audience With Mr Methane: Adventures in Show Business.

An Audience With Mr Methane is at The Standing Order, 62-66 George Street, Edinburgh, from August 9 to 23.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

About this article

The world's top flatulist prepares to unleash himself

This article appeared on p14 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 22 July 2008.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EDT on Tuesday 22 July 2008.
It was last modified at 05.33 EDT on Wednesday 23 July 2008.
It was first published at 19.08 EDT on Tuesday 22 July 2008.